


Mistaken for Missionaries

by bluebeholder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Accidental Gardeners, Accidental Home Decorators, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 23:40:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7594846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebeholder/pseuds/bluebeholder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Dean get mistaken for missionaries by an elderly couple. For once, mistaken identities don't end in disaster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mistaken for Missionaries

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Season 1, between _Phantom Traveler_ and _Bloody Mary_ (4 and 5).

“It’s not my fault that the dumb corpse exploded!” Sam complained. He hurried to catch up with Dean, who was striding down the sidewalk.

“It is your fault that we don’t have spare suit jackets,” Dean said. His hands were shoved into his pockets—which would have looked normal in a full suit, but in this short-sleeved white button-up, just looked odd.

Sam rolled his eyes. They turned and walked up a well-kept garden path lined with friendly cement forest creatures and glass-jeweled wire frogs. “No, that’s definitely on you. You’re the big brother, it’s your job to—”

Dean punched him lightly in the arm. “Shut up. We’re almost there.” 

Quickly, Sam slid to the side and turned the puppy eyes up to eleven. His argument with Dean could wait until later. Dean was already ringing the doorbell, and before the church chimes could even end the door was creaking open. A little old lady, roughly half of Sam’s height, peeked out. 

“Oh, hello!” she chirped. “What are you boys selling?”

Her hair was blue, Sam noticed. “We aren’t selling anything,” Dean began. “We just want to talk to you about—”

She turned around. “Cha-arles!” she caroled into the house. “There are missionary boys here!”

“Missionaries?” Dean asked, turning to face Sam with a blank look of panic scribbled on his face. 

“Just—just roll with it,” Sam said. He plastered on a smile and folded his hands neatly, kicking up the sad-little-brother eyes as much as he could. 

An elderly gentleman creaked up behind the woman. “Hello, hello,” he said. “I hear you boys are missionaries?”

“Yes, we are,” Sam said. He tried to imagine that he was an angel, letting the Light of God shine through his face. He was fairly sure that he was only managing to look vaguely constipated. 

“Yeah, and we need to talk to you—” Dean tried again, and this time the old man cut him off.

He scratched his head. “Wall, you boys are the very thing to help Edna out in the back garden this afternoon.”

“God sent us a pair of helping hands!” Edna said. “Would you be so kind as to help us? We’ll certainly listen to what you have to say if you do.”

Sam looked at his brother. Dean looked like he was going to have a heart attack and die of sheer frustration. So of course Sam said, “Yes, we’ll help you!”

He had not adequately thought through that idea, he realized later. Edna toddled out to the garden with Sam in tow and asked him to help her reorganize her flowerbeds. This entailed being on his hands and knees, digging up plants and moving them around the garden for Edna’s approval. 

“This,” he muttered on the fourth shift of a clump of fluffy pink flowers, “is literally worse than digging graves.”

“What was that, dear?” Edna asked. She was perched in a chair by the table, potting herbs.

Sam forced a smile. “Nothing! Just thinking out loud.”

Meanwhile, Dean was helping to carry boxes. Many boxes. From the basement up to the attic. They were heavy boxes. They were full of disturbingly occult-looking books, creepy-ass china dolls, cultish silverware, linens that flapped menacingly…or maybe Dean was just jumping at shadows. He didn’t want to be here: he wanted to be working the case. But anyway, his arms hurt.

He could feel the dust caking his skin and hair. It was more disgusting than literally anything else he’d done in the last month. And now his legs were aching, too. It was like his own personal hell. A hell coated in flowers and seashells and the colors of an ancient box of mummified Peeps.

“Can I…take…a break?” he asked Charles after four hours of trekking up and down the Mt. Everest of steps in the house.

“Sure, sure, sure,” Charles said. He pulled up a chair at the kitchen table. Dean decided that this house was an actual real honest gingerbread house. The whole table was coated in at least two layers of doilies, and a vase of flowers (living and dead) tottered in the middle of the mass. Dean slumped into the chair, glad to be alive.

The glass sliding door screamed and Sam stumbled inside. He collapsed into the chair across from Dean and Dean couldn’t help but feel a surge of vindictive pleasure at the sight. There was dirt smeared over Sam’s right cheekbone and he was starting to show a sunburn. And this time it really was all Sam’s fault.

Edna appeared around the corner like some sort of freaky blue-haired elderly ninja and set down a massive tray of sandwiches. “You boys have been working very hard and it’s lunchtime, so we thought we’d make sure you were fed,” she said. She patted Dean’s shoulder. “There’s ham and turkey and cucumber and cheese spread and jam…”

Dean resisted the urge to let out a moan. Sam was a little wild-eyed. It was kind of funny. But then Charles came in with a pitcher of lemonade and Dean actually did moan. He and Sam tucked in, pretty much inhaling whatever crossed their plates. Dean thought he was going to pass out from eating too many sandwiches and too much lemonade, but when Edna brought out the pie he realized that this was actually the physical incarnation of Heaven on this green Earth.

After lunch, Dean and Sam were moved to a new task: removing wallpaper from the guest room upstairs. Sam was handed a stack of big white garbage bags. Dean was handed a vast spray bottle and several different scrapers. “Have fun!” Edna chirped. “We’re going to go down and have coffee at the shop, but we’ll be back in a few hours!”

When the door slammed and the house went silent, Sam turned to Dean. “We have to go!” he said. He tugged Dean toward the door, desperate for Dean to listen. “I can’t do this! I’m crap at this!”

Dean was dragging his heels. Sam resisted the urge to dive out the window when his brother said, “Um…I kind of feel like we should stay…I mean, they sorta need us…it’s the kind of thing I thought you would wanna do…”

Ah. The guilt card. A classic, and difficult to play in reverse (since it was usually the younger trying to hit the older where it hurt and using specific Younger Sibling Tactical Advantages). But there it was. Dean had done it. Sam had to respect it.

“Fine, Dean,” he said. He sighed. “How do we peel off wallpaper anyway?”

The wallpaper in question was a disturbing shade of silver, patterned with rather malformed kittens and bright fuchsia ribbons. The work of peeling the plasticky silver part off was but a moment, and—for just a single joyous second—Sam thought they were done when that part was stuffed into garbage bags. 

“Uh, we aren’t done.” Dean grabbed Sam by the arm as Sam tried to leave. He tapped the wall. “There’s this part, the paper they glued down to hold that vinyl crap in place. We gotta take it down too.”

Sam considered swearing violently, thought about where they were and what they were pretending to be, and reconsidered. “Give me the sprayer.”

Five hours later, the walls were clean. Sam’s shirt was wet, he had wallpaper flecks in his hair, and he had glue literally dripping down his arms. Dean had started cussing out the original decorators: they had glued the wallpaper directly onto the drywall. So as Sam sprayed and scraped away, Dean came behind to dry the walls as best they could. The plastic on the floor was an inch deep in pieces of paper. The room smelled sickly-sweet. 

“This is why we don’t have a house,” Dean grumbled. A nails-on-chalkboard screech echoed through the room as his scraper skidded over an embedded nail. 

Sam put his shoulder into the work of taking down the last pieces of paper. It wasn’t much, but to his hands and arms it felt like a lot. “Yeah…how about we never do this again?”

The last of the wallpaper slumped to the ground. Sam stepped back to let Dean get to it with the paper towels. He shook out his hands, trying to relax the cramp that had grown up in his palm, and looked around at the room. Four absolutely spotless white walls looked back. Sam couldn’t deny the tiny glow of pride he felt. 

Edna and Charles were back before dinner time. Edna had brought back coffee cake for both of them, and Charles insisted that they have some coffee while they talked. “Finally, getting back to work,” Dean said, jostling Sam at the bathroom sink for space to wash his hands. 

But they didn’t get anything done. Sam’s mouth was too full of coffee cake and Edna kept coming up with more amusing anecdotes about her grandchildren and Dean and Charles argued about the merits of various types of car parts and old car makes and models. At five o’clock, Sam and Dean had to pretty much beg to get out of the house.

“Thanks for the food,” Dean said. He was grinning his slightly-deranged grin of Sam-let’s-go-please-there’s-still-a-monster-on-the-loose. 

So Sam took his time with the goodbyes. “I hope we were able to help a bit,” he said. He tried to be angelic again. This time it might have worked.

“You boys are godsends,” Edna said. She tugged on Sam’s lapel and he was surprised enough to follow the motion and receive a perfumed peck on the cheek. “I can’t imagine what we’d have done without you.”

Charles offered a firm, if quivery, handshake. “Good luck,” he said simply.

“It’s been a pleasure,” Sam said. Dean received the same treatment, then they were sent on their way with a boxed-up homemade apple pie “for all your friends”. The old couple waved at them as they went down the flower-bedecked walk. Sam felt a certain affection for those odd little cement animals.

In the car, they sat for a minute in the silence. Sam could practically feel Dean building up the steam to say something self-righteously obnoxious, so he decided to preempt it. “It’s not my fault that they thought ‘missionary’ meant ‘unpaid labor’!”

“It is your fault that we were pretending to be missionaries,” Dean said. He turned the key in the ignition. The car rumbled to life and they began to roll slowly down the road, toward the motel. 

They turned down a nice little tree-filled lane. The monster they were after was probably hiding somewhere among the branches. Sam rolled his eyes. “No, that’s definitely on you. You’re the big brother, it’s your job to—”

Before Sam could finish his sentence, Dean punched him lightly in the arm. “Shut up, we’re almost to the dry cleaners. You go in and pick up the jackets.”

As Dean pulled up to the curb, Sam opened the door. He paused and looked over his shoulder at his brother. “You know, whenever you feel like giving up hunting, we could always just start a business as landscapers and house-cleaners.”

“Oh, just get out,” Dean grumbled, but he smiled as he did. Sam was just about to shut the door when he heard Dean say, “We should come back sometime. Help out again, get some pie...”

“We should,” Sam replied, and thought about how nice it would be to go back to visit Edna and Charles again. But for now, he had suit jackets to pick up, and then he and Dean had a monster to catch. And find their father. There would be time for pie and a house and family later.

**Author's Note:**

> Posted at behest of my betas, who like this a lot more than I do.


End file.
